Hacker News Reader

Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

1. ARM-based CPUs have for years (decades) been much more power-efficient than Intel and AMD CPUs. This is regardless of Apple, and is not really about being ahead - it a different path in the design space.

2. If Apple were "far ahead" in terms of performance in general, they would probably have been using these chips in products which aren't smartphones.

View on HN

wrt point 2. I always assumed that it's not only chip performance or efficiency, but ecosystem and software compatibility that's a larger issue.

It's not trivial to port x86 software to ARM, or even run an energy efficient emulator.

Is that correct?

In most cases it's fine since Linux distros for arm have existed for a while. Getting proprietary vendors to support it is a different question.

I believe you are correct. I suspect a big part of Apple's increased popularity since moving to x86 has been the ability to run an alternate OS either via dual-boot or in a VM at native speeds. While it was possible to run Windows in a VM back in the PowerPC days, it was sloooow. While switching to ARM would be relatively trivial for Apple's own software and even OS X applications, the downside would be losing easy/performant/power efficient access to non-OS X applications. That said, I expect Apple to make that trade-off sooner rather than later... x86 compatibility isn't nearly as important today as it was 10 or even 5 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com